Can AFL clubs handle the truth?

CLUBS remain largely in the dark about drugs. They don't know who is using what, whether a particular player has an serious issue and the only time they will know is when they are called, five minutes before the media, to be told that their player has struck out and will be suspended.

Mind you, this has only ever happened once, to Hawthorn's Travis Tuck. To the frustration of many dim-bulb observers, the object of the policy was - and will remain - rehabilitation, not punishment.

The summit can be seen as a push by clubs to be brought in to the loop. The policy, to date, has been explicitly designed to keep the information in the hands of doctors and not in view of CEOs, coaches or other footy officials.

In essence, this is what the ''summit'' - a very Bob Hawke-era concept - was really about. Clubs feel excluded, powerless to deal with the invisible phantoms of cocaine, ecstacy and cystal meth. They are selling themselves as a party that can help. The players are wary, but prepared to listen. After the talk, the substance of the policy, so to speak, is the same, with the only the self-reporting scam to be closed.

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The current policy has been based partly on the notion that clubs do not have a player's welfare alone to take into account; they have sponsors to appease, appearances to keep and, not least, games to win.

The prevailing view has been that clubs, in Jack Nicholson's words, can't handle the truth. If they were told after two strikes, the average player might be cactus, the star put up for trade. But even that's not the issue, which is that confidentiality is more apt to vanish once a club knows; a CEO, as one explained, would be duty-bound to tell his board. And once the board knows, so will everyone else.

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It transpires, though, that the clubs aren't completely out of the loop if they have a cluster of positive tests. The CEO is called in to meet with the AFL doctors if there are three ''strikes'' within a six-month period, as we believe has happened with two clubs fairly recently.

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But the clubs still aren't told the players' identities. One would assume they should be able to find out once this alarm has been sounded.

Doctors aside, even the people running clubs are finding themselves on a Matterhorn-level learning curve on this subject. In the bombardment of expert opinion they heard on Wednesday, they received some - very measured - support for being told after two strikes from Dr Michael Carr-Gregg.

What the meeting heard, via the experts, was that there were three main types using drugs in the AFL.

Type A is the player who's had too much to drink, is contrite and after a talking to, will likely never do it again.

Type B is the player who has mental health or psychological issues and is, in effect, self-medicating with illicit drugs (rather than prescription stuff).

Type C is the player who uses drugs, doesn't give a fig about what anyone thinks and is effectively, as one at the meeting put it, extending his index finger to everyone, including his club.

No one, including the clubs, wants to punish Types A or B. They aren't the issue. One is a oncer, the other has an underlying health issue. Tuck, for instance, was clearly Type B.

But Type C is in the crosshairs of the clubs. They want to know about him and, presumably, to deal with him.

That's where the upcoming talks, through these endless working parties, are headed.